It's Finally Friday.

Time does not fly between 8 and 5. This weekend, however, will pass in a heartbeat.

I have things to do this weekend. The dog and I will both get haircuts, though not at the same salon. He now goes to the salon that, back in the day, when I was a naive new Yorkie Mama, I thought was Outrageously Expensive. And I tried, um, 4 or 5 other shops, with wildly erratic results. (My favorite was the place that brushed him out and sprayed him with dry bath product and pretended they'd actually groomed him.)

This place was on the ball enough to fire the groomer who gave the Murph a razor burn in a very personal place before I even complained to them about it, and the girls are nice and remember him and greet him with hugs. Dog groomers are just like human hair salons, you have to shop around and usually end up spending more than you'd thought you'd ever spend at a place that you'd thought was too hoity-toity, which turns out to be not hoity-toity at all and you get what you pay for.

So then I'm back to the chi-chi spa for my own haircut. My Hair God is about to flee Florida, so I consider it critical that he continue the shaping of my growing-in patch, before I have to turn my head over to someone else if his house sells before mine. He has worked wonders with an impossible hair challenge, seriously. When I went to him post-op, I had an eighth of an inch of baby fuzz over a wide swath - to understand this, draw an imaginary line that goes up from the inner corner of your left eye, and imagine yourself bald in a patch that extends from that point over your eye at the front of your hairline, back 2 or 3 inches, curving around your head to end with a naked swath behind the left ear. Everything to the front of that imaginary line is gone, and there is an interesting red scar running the length of the back edge of the bald spot. (Somehow my beloved surgeon managed to put the incision on the back third of the shaved strip, so now that the hair is growing back you can't see it unless my hair is wet, and then I'd have to point it out. And he did that thoughtful thing while worrying about death, blindness, paralysis and such, serious things, not my future hairstyling needs, but he's that kind of thoughtful.*) *Edited: I give the credit for the minimalist head shaving to those who prepped me for surgery, but the elegant planning and the placement of the incision to minimize future annoyance was his. I am well aware that there was a whole team of amazingly considerate people in that OR. And though immediately post-op, when I was sweaty and nasty from the meds and had a knot in my hair at the back of my head the size of a fist and thought I'd have been better off if they'd shaved it all, because damn that was nasty, I now applaud them for knowing best. Because it's 8 months and I have a normal, office-ready style I don't have to think about anymore.

That is what I presented to the Hair God, and he turned it into a functional hairstyle, creating what I called the hair flap, a layer that covered the bald patch. It wasn't a style I'd have picked voluntarily, but under the circumstances it was freaking amazing and fabulous, and let me go out in public without a scarf. Not that I was really self-conscious over it, I mean, hell, it's just hair, it grows, but I was conscious of not wanting to make people uncomfortable by flashing the scar. That bothered me a bit. And now the naked patch has grown in with a comically irregular-length crop of hair, and some of it is actually long enough to be groomed into the neighborhood, especially the wild bits in front of my left ear. Two more haircuts and my bangs won't have that funky-short underlayer. So Hair God's house cannot sell before February. Then I wish him Godspeed as he flees Florida.

My drop-dead list the house date is now January. I am resigned to taking a big hit on the price, but I'll still at least make a profit of some sort. That's kind of nice after 11 years and pouring a ton of money and sweat equity into it. If I stop to think about how much we put into this place over the years I may cry. There is no way that I will "come out ahead" after calculating all of the repairs and improvements. And no, we didn't improve anything beyond the values in the neighborhood, because I actually know this business. Which is why I say this: Anyone who tells you that a home is a great investment is a fucking liar. It's a place to live, it's nice that it is yours and you can do what you want with it if the HOA will let you, but as an investment, you might as well put your cash in Jimmy Choos and Botox. Just my tired, bitter, have owned and sold four houses opinion.

Rather than go off on a tangent that would sound very jealous and unattractive, I'll go work on Cousin C's scarf, and count my many blessings. Happy Friday!